Part 4 of a Commentary
on the CIA's Remote Viewing Report
by Paul H. Smith

Since publishing the three installments of my review of the
CIA/AIR report on remote viewing, I have received a number of
comments concerning how I described Ed May's research in Part 2.
My evaluation concluded that the research selected for
evaluation--while interesting from a parapsychological standpoint--was
of limited value in (a) establishing the reality of remote
viewing, and (b) developing new techniques to improve the
efficiency of the operational effort. These two goals were among
the three originally mandated for the program by Congress during
the GRILL FLAME era, and never officially rescinded.

Based on what is evident in the AIR report, and on peripheral
material and knowledgeable sources to which I had access, my
assessment of the research program seemed accurate. The
experiments evaluated by the AIR at the behest of the CIA were
the ten most recently done by May at SAIC, and were arbitrarily chosen
by Ray Hyman and his colleagues at AIR to represent the research
done on remote viewing. I still maintain that those ten
experiments were inadequate in achieving goals (a) and (b) above.
However, this assessment--admittedly based on incomplete, if
nonetheless extensive data--may reflect unfairly on Ed May's
efforts and intentions in the pursuit of remote viewing and psi
research. It is, of course, not Ed May's fault that Hyman and his
associates refused to examine other of the program's research that
might have more strongly supported the remote viewing phenomenon.

Comments from Joe McMoneagle shed further interesting light on
Ray Hyman's actions in the course of the AIR survey. According to Joe,
"Hyman sat down with two other members of the AIR staff and two reps
from the agency [CIA]," and sorted through "about sixty papers"
reporting on experiments done at SRI-I and SAIC. They then
"'decided' which ones they would accept for review..."

* * *

This November I had a conversation with Dale Graff, who during
his career was one of the primary DIA points-of-contact for the
program, and was also branch chief and project manager for the
operational unit at Ft. Meade in the early '90s. Dale told me he felt
that I had erred in my comments on the research program, and that I had
based my analysis on inadequate knowledge of the circumstances
under which the research program was conducted.

According to Dale (and he speaks with some authority, since he
was often intimately involved in the contracting process throughout
much of the program's history until his retirement in 1993),
there were many bureaucratic and political factors that went
beyond operational considerations in guiding the course the
research took. Often, May was forced by agencies and influential
individuals with other agendas to pursue specific experimental
directions that went beyond supporting the operational remote
viewing effort. Neither May, nor Graff and his DIA associates were
fully able to dictate the route experiments were to take. Though
I discussed this problem in Part 2 of the review, I did not
sufficiently recognize the impact it had on the research program.

Dale made a further point in the course of our conversation. He
suggested that even if parapsychology research unrelated to remote
viewing per se did not directly affect remote viewing as an
intelligence collection tool, nonetheless successful research could
still help improve the program's prospects. Strong evidence of
any psi effect would undercut the objections of the critics and bolster
support for all aspects of the RV program-- including the
operational unit.

While I myself believe that a research program that more fully
concentrated on the remote viewing phenomenon itself could have served
much the same purpose, still Dale's point is certainly relevant.

* * *

Other information I received recently also shows May in a more
favorable light. According to Joe McMoneagle, "on two occasions, Ed
(with myself and others) did the two week circuit in DC,
convincing the folks in Congress that the program shouldn't be shut
down and it should be funded" (this refers to funding for the
operational program; research funding, Joe explains, was a
separate issue).

Part 2 of the review also contained some misinformation that I
must here clear up. My evaluation of the support received from Ed May
and the research program was based on mine and others' perceptions at
the "operator level" in the Ft. Meade unit. We saw little or no
input from the research folks to show that they even cared that we
existed, and concluded they were ignoring us and going off on
their own tangent.

Thanks to McMoneagle, I now know that perception to be erroneous.
He mentioned in his communications with me that along with the boxes of
research passed to the AIR evaluators (and, as I reported, not
subsequently "evaluated") were another "nineteen packages of
reports, recommendations, and materials from SRI-I and SAIC,
[including] collection methodologies," which had been passed to
the managers of the operational program over the period 1988 to 1994
and NEVER OPENED. In other words, the research program was indeed
attempting to fulfill its obligation to support the operational
unit, but was apparently short-stopped by the very people who
should have been integrating any promising new techniques or
methods developed by the research.

As an operational viewer, I find it outrageous that this material
was not at least evaluated, and passed on if it looked useful. Whether
or not it could ultimately have been integrated with the other
successful methods we used (and I suspect that much, if not all
might have been), I think most of us would have welcomed the
opportunity to at least entertain responsible new ideas and
approaches--particularly if they shed light on some of the
thornier problems with which we often had to deal. I owe Ed May
and his team an apology on this one.

Finally, I must reiterate a point I made in Part One of the Mr.
"X" review, which McMoneagle has reminded me of. One should have no
illusions about the last days of STAR GATE. In its final years,
the program suffered from major problems and deficiencies, and
provided no little ammunition of its own to be used against it.
Uneven and at times outright bad management, poor performance and
few accurate results in the latter years, ill- will from
upper-echelon bosses, poor unit morale, and divisiveness within
the organization tolled Star Gate's death knell. Nevertheless,
had the program's high-level management (i.e., from the director
and deputy director level on down), (1) wanted the program to
succeed, and (2) been doing their jobs properly, the deplorable
conditions at the Ft. Meade unit would never have developed.